


Vega

by westfall



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, voices of a distant star AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 13:52:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4669022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westfall/pseuds/westfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kei is in the middle of the journey outside the galaxy when he types, “I’m passing Vega. It’s the 5th brightest star in the sky.”</p><p>He is barely sixteen when he sends that message. Kuroo is twenty-two when he receives it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vega

Kei is in the middle of the journey outside the galaxy when he types, “I’m passing Vega. It’s the 5th brightest star in the sky.”

He is barely sixteen when he sends that message. Kuroo is twenty-two when he receives it. His final text to Kuroo before they enter battle is a picture of the star Altair. It takes ten Earth years to send.

The year is 2245. A damaged mecha tracer lands on Earth, carrying the battle-weary occupants of the 2203 war against extraterrestrials. Sixteen year old Kei blinks in the sun—a sun that, from twenty feet away, had been so glaring and ominous. From earth, the sun seems kind.

There is a man waiting at the forefront of the crowd welcoming the soldiers home. Kei doesn’t recognize him at first, the gray hairs or the fine wrinkles around his eyes, but ten seconds is all it takes for everything to thunk loudly and painfully into place. Authorities rush them forward, and it’s like Kei is in free fall, zero g, weightless.

The man smiles at him, tired and aged and fragile looking, and sixteen year old Kei starts to cry and cannot stop.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asks him, and something wraps tight around Kei’s heart and _squeezes_ , and this is more terrifying than aliens, than the draft that broke them apart in the first place, than the thought of being stranded up there in space with no oxygen and only the deep oppressive silence of the universe to crush him—this is more terrifying than that.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and can’t bring himself to hug back when fifty-nine year old Kuroo wraps his arms around him, arms that are now much weaker than what they used to be, back when Kuroo was still seventeen and the fulcrum that moved Kei’s entire world.

Because Kei had promised Kuroo forty-two years ago that they would meet again, but never in his lifetime would he have imagined it like this—Kuroo aged, fraying, Kei still young and scared, forty-two irreversible years of distance that couldn’t be undone or taken back—and a terrible, throbbing silence ebbing above their heads.

**Author's Note:**

> also on [tumblr](http://hagkyo.tumblr.com/post/127733095282/vega)!


End file.
